World

Fierce Tropical Cyclone Winston threatens to devastate Fiji

The tropical island of Fiji is facing a dire threat this weekend from Tropical Cyclone Winston, which despite its innocuous name is packing a formidable punch, with estimated sustained winds of Category 5 intensity.

The storm has meandered since it formed more than a week ago, scoring the rare feat of striking the same island — Vava'u — in the small island nation of Tonga twice in one week, as a Category 2 storm.

However, it appears to have made up its mind now, and is bent on striking the capital of Fiji as a far more potent storm than what Tonga experienced.

Cyclone Winston is now making its approach to Fiji as an intensifying Category 5 storm that could cause widespread devastation on an island that has never experienced a storm of this intensity. In addition, it is going to strike from a direction (roughly east to west) that is also rare, if not unheard of, in Fiji.

Already, as of 4:15 p.m. ET, the eye of the storm was visible on Fiji's radar screens, indicating the approach of the worst winds, rains and potentially life-threatening storm surge.

Winston raw T# 8.0, a number reserved for only the most violent TCs. Devastating impact on Fiji almost inevitable. pic.twitter.com/ud2ZNrDsvg

According to the Washington Post, Fiji's main island of Viti Levu, which has a population of about 700,000, last had close brushes with storms close to this intensity in 1990 and 2012, but those storms were weaker than Winston is.

In addition, those storms didn't hit the island as directly as this storm is projected to do.

The Fiji Meteorological Service has rated the storm's intensity as a Category 5 on Australia's scale, with maximum sustained winds of 145 miles per hour, which would make it a strong Category 4 storm in the Atlantic Ocean.

However, there are indications that the storm is significantly stronger than that. Satellite techniques that meteorologists use to infer a storm's intensity show the storm may have sustained winds closer to 180 miles per hour, which would rank it as a high-end Category 5 storm in both the South Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean basins.

In fact, some meteorologists are comparing the satellite intensity estimates to Super Typhoon Haiyan and Hurricane Patricia, both of which were among the most intense storms ever recorded on Earth.

The Joint Typhoon Warning Center, which is jointly run by the U.S. Air Force and Navy, estimates the storm to be a Category 5 with maximum sustained winds at 165 miles per hour. The forecast track has been adjusted northward compared to previous forecasts, with the possibility that the center of the storm will track between the Viti Levu and the island of Vanua Levu.

The JTWC forecasts the storm to be near or over the southwestern tip of Vanua Levu on Feb. 20, with sustained winds on the order of an astonishingly strong 185 miles per hour.

That track would cause severe damage on both islands, due to the storm's large swath of hurricane force winds.

Fiji meteorologist Neville Koop told Australia's ABC News that many of the 75,000 residents of the low-lying capital of Suva may not fully realize the danger looming off the coast.

"Most of the people in Suva are under the misapprehension that Suva doesn't get cyclones - that it's only the north and the west of the country that seems to get them and the ones that come past Suva are weak and insipid," he said.

"This is the exception to that — it's probably one of the strongest cyclones to affect the capital in the last decade or two."

If the satellite intensity estimates are correct (and without aircraft reconnaissance in this area we just don't know), then Cyclone Winston will be the strongest storm on record to affect the capital.

The strong El Niño underway in the tropical Pacific favors more tropical cyclones in this region, since sea surface temperatures are significantly higher than average for this time of year. The warm waters help fuel such storms, and were likely one of the factors that enabled Cyclone Winston to intensify so quickly and significantly.

This story was updated at 4:30 p.m. ET to indicate the new track and intensity estimates.

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